Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?

I spent a while figuring out the cheapest possible way of doing front end dev for a series of blog posts (that I never wrote) . The result was using a Pi3B+ and a lot of open source tools, Github and Netlify. It works so well I'm still using it for a ton of dev.

Pi-Hole, RetroPie, and for my 1st-grade son I installed Kano OS for his first computer. I see a couple of Pi 4s as upgrades in my future.

Also looking to get my SDR rig up and running on one of the other Pis i have waiting to be used.

Media center & TV PC. I have a 4 TB external hard drive connected to it (and swap on it). Using a custom compiled kernel with zswap support, browsing the web isn't that bad with the 1GB of RAM on the 3B.

I've also hooked up an RTL-SDR to it and ran rtl-tcp instead of needing to run a long USB cord.

I've made some interesting projects over the years - only a writeup on a few of these, and some are in pieces and in various states of disrepair after moving so much.

Some write ups on larger projects:

1. I used a raspberry pi to coordinate the firing of multiple cameras, and then had the pi upload to a cloud service that would stitch them together to an "infinite zoom" super selfie. https://medium.com/@thekeithchester/gigasnap- a-prototyping-story-efed72099d32

2. I created a library that made it dead simple for a raspberry pi to communicate to arduinos, and used that to control a lot of hardware projects, like little robots. https://medium.com/@thekeithchester/serial-synapse-94a114aa2...

3. Raspberry Pi's controlled the heartbeat detection (controlled lights and music of your booth) and conductive paint controller (I built it and still don't understand the meaning) for this art piece. https://vimeo.com/207047769

4. I had a video / text message doorbell a couple of apartments ago. https://github.com/hlfshell/doorbell

5. Used one as an MQTT hub for numerous IoT projects. I created https://github.com/hlfshell/mqtt-scheduler to schedule MQTT jobs for things like the arduino powered garden controller (lights + water pumps) I built for my wife. https://github.com/hlfshell/garden-relay

6. This never got off the ground, but when Pokemon Go had first launched and was super popular, I wrote a slackbot that would alert everyone in the office when pokemon (outside of the super common Rattatas and Pidgeots) was nearby. I was repurposing that code to make a portable Pokemon radar that would jump a false account around the area around you, thus hunting down pokemon for you. https://github.com/hlfshell/pokemon-tracker It never got far as the game got super stale quick.

print server for an older printer